Violence interrupter Cobe Williams appears in a scene from, "The Interrupters."
Ran on: 09-02-2011
Cobe Williams is one of the members of CeaseFire featured in &quo;The Interrupters,&quo; a chilling documentary about a group of peacekeepers who risk their lives in an effort to stop the killing on Chicago's streets.

Steve James got snubbed again. In what has virtually become an annual ritual, at least one documentary every year strikes a chord but fails to make the Academy Award "short list" of 15 nonfiction features.

Despite critical raves during its theatrical release last summer, James' urban violence doc, "The Interrupters," did not make the cut. In 1994, his acclaimed basketball movie "Hoop Dreams" also got ignored by Oscar voters. The resulting brouhaha spurred the academy's documentary branch to change rules aimed at bringing its choices more in tune with the zeitgeist, insiders say.

So what happened to "The Interrupters"? Jon Else, director of UC Berkeley's documentary program, says " 'The Interrupters' is an amazing film."

Else has produced or directed four Oscar-nominated nonfiction films and, in previous years, he's helped select short-list candidates as a member of the academy's documentary branch.

Else explains how Oscar candidates get picked: "When you serve on the screening subcommittee, you get a big box of DVD screeners to watch. We take the thing very seriously, and it's a serious time commitment. We watch the whole film and do not give comparative rankings until we've watched all of them."

Else adds, "The goal of the documentary branch is to make the selection as democratic as possible so that it reflects our community as much as possible. We're not there yet, but we're much closer than we were 15 years ago."

Several Bay Area-connected talents will be competing for a slot among the 2012 final five.

Former residents Philip Gefter and Richard Press moved east to make "Bill Cunningham New York," about the fabled street fashion photographer. San Francisco filmmakers David Weissmanand Bill Weberco-directed "We Were Here," chronicling the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

2 Spielberg films are Oscar contenders

Steven Spielberg has been missing in action since the summer of 2008, but now he's back with a vengeance with two Oscar contenders released within five days of each other.

Motion-capture adventure "Tintin" (Dec. 21), produced by "Lord of the Rings" mogul Peter Jackson, represents Spielberg's first 3-D effort, while "War Horse" (Dec. 25) boasts a lofty literary pedigree in the form of its earlier incarnation as an award-winning play.

"Movie Awards" author Tom O'Neil says, "Never before has a director released two major Oscar contenders in the same week, but many have had multiple films in the same derby."

British playwright Christopher Hamptonwrote the screenplay. "I'd always been interested in Freud and the psychoanalytic movement," he says.

Hampton says that his curiosity was further sparked when he came across historian John Kerr's book "A Most Dangerous Method." "The author cautiously did not have evidence of an affair," he says. "By the time I came to work on the story, more material emerged in Switzerland and Germany, which made it pretty plain that the affair had taken place."

Hampton became especially inspired to tell the tale on a research visit to a Swiss sanitarium. There he found Jung's original handwritten case notes in the basement. "That's when I knew I had a story," says Hampton. "I wanted to follow the extraordinary arc of this seriously disabled woman who got better and became a significant psychoanalytical thinker."

The irony: While the doctor healed the patient, he couldn't heal himself. By film's end, Hampton notes, "Jung is on the brink of a five-year nervous breakdown." {sbox}